Darkvision - Bruce R. Cordell [99]
With skill acquired during a childhood spent in a gargantuan cavern, he free-climbed the overhanging, bulging rock surface. He easily reached the lowest jagged crack in the boulder's mostly smooth surface.
Iahn was somewhat familiar with geology, thanks to Deep Imaskar's location, and therefore knew a geode was a hollow, spherical rock whose cavity was lined with crystals. Some geodes were completely filled with crystals. Those were called nodules.
Gazing into the crack, Iahn thought this great boulder was completely filled with Celestial Nadir crystal, making it a nodule. But something glimmered at the nodule's center. A palely glowing blot like a luminiferous fungus, or subterranean sea shape…
Then…
Darkness.
Blowing, howling, damp gloom. Shadows reaching like fingers… grasping. Stretching closer. Screaming…
Iahn's eyes snapped open. He lay on the path, at the nexus of the three ways. Ususi bent over him, patting his cheek and looking concerned. The two Vaelanites stood nearby, looking useless.
He demanded, "Tell me what happened. I recall… a nodule?" Darkness clawed at his brain and was gone again in a flash. He clutched his head.
Ususi said, "You tell us. One moment you were describing how the cavity was filled with agate. Then you screamed and fell fifteen paces without trying to catch yourself. I thought you'd been struck dead, or petrified. Then I heard you mumble about fingers. We dragged you back here. What did you see?"
"Something we need to destroy."
The vengeance taker tottered to his feet. Pain lanced his left shin, and his right shoulder and arm-souvenirs from the fall he couldn't remember, he supposed.
He told them, "Something terrible is caught in that nodule… Pandorym, you called it? If we destroy it, we destroy the threat reaching into the world, and into Deep Imaskar." Now who was the loose-lipped one? Didn't matter. His conviction made him reckless.
The one with the crystal arm stepped forward. His eyes were red, and his face tear-streaked. "Yes, let's destroy it!"
"Iahn, Warian, wait. You're only partly right. That husk of stone may-may-imprison Pandorym's body, whatever shape it truly possesses. Or it could be some other entity completely unrelated to Pandorym. The Celestial Nadir is filled with such dangerous detritus. Either way, it's important to remember that the body and mind of Pandorym were never kept in the same place-too dangerous."
"Explain," he ordered.
"I described before how Pandorym was a doomsday weapon the Imaskari didn't dare release. They only wanted to threaten Pandorym's release, and thus the entity's psyche was extracted from its physical shell and stored in the Imperial Weapons Cache of the Purple Palace."
Ususi turned to point at the wavering facade of the palace. "Now the psyche has partly freed itself, with Shaddon's help. The mind is the only vulnerable portion of Pandorym. The body, even if that is it, is beyond my ability to affect, even if I use the keystone to scrape away the Celestial Nadir crystal that has scabbed over it. We must go to the palace, find the vessel that once contained Pandorym's psyche, and close it again."
Warian asked, his face flushed, "Since Pandorym has all these servitors, why doesn't it just coerce one into fully releasing it?"
Ususi said, "I'm sure Pandorym's tried that many times. The longer we fail to contain its growing influence, the sooner it will be successful in freeing its mind from the arcane constraints that yet tether it."
Iahn asked, "My duty is to return you to Deep Imaskar so you can stem the incursion. Yet you say our best hope is to enter the Weapons Cache of the Purple Palace instead of returning first to our imperiled city. Will you stake the safety of Deep Imaskar on this course of action?"
"I don't see any other option. If we go to Deep Imaskar to fight whatever else Pandorym has corrupted and freed from the Weapons Cache, we'll be attacking only the symptoms. We must get to the root of the problem and restopper Pandorym's